Who says a white-haired, curly mustachioed sea captain can’t roll with the cool kids?
With the help of NYC fashion company KITH, Cap’n Crunch is ditching his barnacle-encrusted nautical garb for some truly 21st century threads. I guess he finally realized that epaulets are so last millennium. The partnership between the Cap’n and KITH comes as an extension of the latter’s KITH Treats cereal bar—the first of its kind in the city, predating even Kellogg’s recent foray into the cereal café game.
The ever-trendy KITH Treats has partnered with nostalgia icons like Power Rangers and Rugrats in the past, and since I’ve written before that Cap’n Crunch is nostalgia embodied, it makes sense that KITH designer Ronnie Fieg would make the Cap’n his next V.I.P.
Any party that has Rita Repulsa, Tommy Pickles, and Cap’n Crunch on the guest list is worth sneaking past the bouncer for. Continue reading →
“Gimme a fat stack of phat Breakfast Flats, STAT!”
Now that Quaker’s new-for-2016 Breakfast Flats—which come in Cranberry Almond, Banana Honey Nut, and Golden Raisin Cinnamon—are on shelves, you probably hear that phrase around all the time.
Or more likely, you’ve probably never heard it, since I just made it up. Plus, no one has used the word “phat” since the Taft administration. He was the raddest, coolest president, after all.
All William Howards aside, a fat stack of 3 plastic-wrapped Golden Raisin Cinnamon breakfast bars sits in front of me. Full disclosure: the main reason I’m reviewing these is because my loving grandmother gave them to me as a thoughtful gift, knowing how much I love Raisin Bran.
So this one’s for you, Grandma. Time to make you proud by photographing sticky glazed raisin rectangles. Continue reading →
Quick: pretend you’re in 4th grade and it’s lunch time. You sit down at an uncomfortable wooden table, and tear open your hyper-crinkly brown bag while you wait for your friends to come back from the hot lunch line with their spicy chicken sandwiches and Bosco breadsticks.
You’re more than a little jealous of them, but you know Mom had to have packed you something good. So what’s the main course? Ham and cheese on rye? Leftover chow mein from China Kingdom down the road?
Both guesses are wrong. In an attempt to get you eating healthy, Mom packed Quaker’s newest instant oatmeal cup flavors: Banana Bonanza and Blueberry Bash.
But are these oatmeal cones worth trudging over to the school’s vintage, pizza sauce-stained microwave for? Or should you trade them like edible Pokémon cards and try to game Billy out of his Ziploc full of Oreos?
Those are the existential questions I hope to answer.
Yep, you read that title right. Recently, Cap’n Crunch’s box art game has been very on point—and I’m not just talking about the boxes that involve Cap’n Crunch playing actual sports games.
Better yet, the backs of these boxes feature more than just the ever-lively cereal ship captain we know and love. Alongside games, puzzles, a bustling zoo of caricatured animals, and at least one Statue of Liberty, recent Cap’n Crunch boxes have featured countless revivals of vintage Quaker mascots.
From Crunch mainstays like Jean LaFoote to obscure, decades-old villains like Magnolia Bulkhead, these 2016 boxes have something for cereal lovers from the ’60s, ’80s, and every where (or should I say every when) in-between.
As a serious cereal fan myself, I wasn’t content with just looking at these awesome new boxes. I wanted to find out what was behind this recent Crunchatized revitalization, especially after boxes of Peanut Butter Crunch have featured that same Olympics scene since the 2008 Beijing Games.
Before long, I found out who was behind this shift, too. Continue reading →
All brands celebrate football season differently. M&M’s slaps eye grease and jerseys on their famous spokescandies. Pepsi erects giant cyborg quarterbacks made out of cardboard and 12-packs for grocery store displays. But Cap’n Crunch? He releases an entire football themed cereal!
It’s called Cap’n Crunch’s Touchdown Crunch cereal, and it was first introduced in 2009. However, there’s one key difference between today’s Touchdown Crunch and the one from 7 years ago. If you cross-compare the boxes, you’ll see that Cap’n Crunch got buff!
Since the Cap’n is a 53-year old cereal mascot, I can’t see why he suddenly reformed his fitness plan. Maybe it was to silence all those high school bullies who made fun of his gravity-defying eyebrows.
Need something to Brite-n your day? Okay, do you need four things to brighten your day after that terrible pun?
Well you’re in luck, because there are four new episodes in cereal archivist Gabe Fonseca’s Cereal Time YouTube series. Longtime Cereal Time binge watchers know the drill, but I’ll catch everyone else up to speed on this series in one sentence:
One man spotlights one cereal every one week to produce three-to-four fun-filled minutes of breakfast nostalgia.
Intrigued? Let’s start somewhere over the rainbow with Gabe’s episode on Rainbow Brite Cereal. As he states in the video, this 1985 cereal was a tie-in with Rainbow Brite’s animated feature film, and it features a literal rainbow of fruity and crunchy…shapes?
The more logical would see them as Rainbow Brite’s hair curls or shirt sleeves, but I prefer to call them “Macaroni & cheese mixed with the colorful grubs Timon and Pumbaa eat in The Lion King.” Continue reading →
I know this cereal is called Pumpkin Spice Life, but in my mind, there’s an invisible equals sign in-between the last two words.
Pumpkin Spice = Life.
It’s the kind of thing a true autumn addict would get tattooed above their knuckles after getting sent to jail for building jack-o-lantern totem poles above the legal height limit. If that sounds like the plot of a gritty Goosebumps reboot, then I’ve succeeded.
But for these next 3-4 months, pumpkin spice really will be life for grocery store browsers and BuzzFeed editors everywhere. And the latest cereal staple to jump on this cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, allspice, cloves, Donner, and Blitzen bandwagon is Life. Continue reading →
“Pumpkin Spice Life” doesn’t even sound like the name of a cereal. It just sounds like an accurate description of September through November these days.
From yogurt and doughnuts to dish soap and cat litter (nope, I’m not kidding), pumpkin spice takes no prisoners with its potent combo of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, allspice, sometimes cloves, and sometimes even actual pumpkin—but usually just an orange Starbucks squirt bottle labeled “P.U.M.P.K.I.N.”
Two years ago, you would have been hard pressed to find pumpkin spice in any cereal outside of Trader Joe’s Pumpkin O’s. But now as the Great Pumpkin Invasion continues (not to be confused with the beloved holiday special Duck and Cover Charlie Brown: It’s the Great Pumpkin Invasion!), more and more breakfast classics are getting in on the fun.
Frosted Mini-Wheats and Puffins did it last year, Special K has already thrown its hat in the 2016 ring using its noodly red letter appendages, and now even the hip ol’ Quaker dude is investigating this hip trend all the young people are raving about.
It looks a lot like normal Life, but it claims to be “Naturally Flavored with Other Natural Flavors.” This is in sharp contrast to the spicy superstars of Special K Pumpkin Spice Crunch, but I, for one, am looking forward to Pumpkin Spice Life: “the cereal so natural they named it twice.”
Limited Edition Pumpkin Spice Life cereal popped up on product review site Influenster the other day, and our ever-vigilant friends at Candy Hunting blew the story as wide open as a chunky gourd on an episode of Punkin’ Chunkin’. Thanks again to Candy Hunting for being a regular Encyclopedia Brown when it comes to all things brown: be they chocolate, caramel, or peanut butter.
While we we wait for Pumpkin Spice Life to hit shelves, we can just squirt a bunch of that P.U.M.P.K.I.N. syrup on our Cinnamon Life.
